This invention relates to textile printing, and more particularly to textile printing with an inkjet printer.
Textile printing generally requires a substantial investment in time and resources to set up printing screens for a single production run of material. Switching printing machinery to production of a different design requires similar investments, and revising a design also entails the cost to produce new screens.
To permit short production runs and prototyping of designs without major investment, printing systems have been developed that employ computer printers to generate a pattern of thermally-activated dye-bearing ink on a transfer surface, which is later applied to textile material in conjunction with high temperatures to activate the dye. This permits nearly instantaneous creation and revision of designs in the form of printable multicolor transfer sheets, with out the preparation of conventional printing screens. When the printer is a thermal ink jet printer, printing occurs at temperatures below that which would activate the dye. Thermally-activated dyes are suitable only for printing synthetic fabrics, and are unsuitable for natural fibers such as cotton, which do not absorb the dyes fully, and which therefore produce an unacceptably faded print.
Cotton and other natural fiber or cellulosic fiber textiles are normally printed with reactive dyes by screening the reactive ink pastes directly onto dry fabric, which typically will have been pretreated with an alkali solution or comparable pretreatment. The fabric is then typically heat treated with steam to cause the dyes to bond with the fabric.
A method of printing includes coating a transfer sheet with a first ink component that has an ink thickener; and operating an ink jet printing apparatus to emit a second ink component onto the transfer sheet to form a thickened resulting ink in a selected pattern. The second ink component has a selected dye and a selected solvent in which the thickener is soluble.
Many of the attendant features of this invention will be more readily appreciated as the same becomes better understood by reference to the following detailed description and considered in connection with the accompanying drawings in which like reference symbols designate like parts throughout.